JD Hayworth, a barnstorming Arizona Republican who is campaigning for the Senate, has strong opinions about his state’s new law on illegal immigration.

The law, known as SB1070 and due to come into effect this week, requires police to arrest suspected illegal immigrants and makes it a crime not to have valid immigration papers on your person. It has prompted Hispanics to fear racial profiling, immigrants to flee the state in droves, activists to organise consumer boycotts and the Obama administration to sue in federal court.

Hayworth has an objection, too. He thinks the law is not enough. Speaking to an overwhelmingly white crowd at a “town hall” meeting in suburban Mesa last week, Hayworth said it was time to stop automatically granting citizenship to anyone born in Arizona.

“There is a whole new term: birth tourism. In the jet age there are people who time their gestation period so they give birth on American soil,” he declared. State senator Russell Pearce, who helped come up with SB1070, is now pushing for a law along those lines.